Azure offers two primary types of storage replication: Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) and Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS).
LRS replicates your data three times within a single datacenter. This makes it highly resistant to hardware failures. However, it is not immune to complete datacenter failures – a common vulnerability in the event of major natural disasters.
GRS, on the other hand, replicates your data six times across two Azure regions, with each region hosting three copies. The second region is always hundreds of miles away from the original region, offering greater protection against regional disasters.
As such, choosing between the two will depend on your needs for data redundancy and your budget, as GRS is naturally more costly than LRS due to the additional protections it offers.
Configuring Storage-Level Replication for SAP Workloads
Here’s how to configure Azure storage-level replication for SAP workloads:
- Firstly, navigate to the Azure portal and choose ‘Storage accounts’ in the left navigation pane.
- Click on ‘Add’ to create a new storage account. Complete the fields in the Basics tab, including Subscription, Resource Group, Storage account name, Region, Performance, Account kind, and Replication.
- In the ‘Replication’ field, you can select from several replication options: including LRS, GRS, RA-GRS (Read-access geo-redundant storage), and ZRS (Zone-redundant storage).
- After you’ve made your selection, continue to the ‘Next: Networking’ tab. Decide whether you want to use public endpoints, private endpoints, or a combination of both.
- In the ‘Data Protection’ tab, you can enable or disable soft delete, blob versioning, and blob container soft delete.
- Review your settings on the ‘Review + create’ tab, then click ‘Create’ to create the new storage account.
Decision Factors for SAP Workloads
When choosing the type of storage-level replication for your SAP workloads, you need to take the following factors into consideration:
- Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) requirements: Do your corporate policies or compliance regulations require certain levels of data redundancy? GRS may be a better option if this is the case.
- Data sensitivity and privacy rules: If your data contains sensitive or private information, you may need to think about where it is physically stored and transmitted.
- Performance needs: Higher redundancy often means longer latency. Will this impact your SAP workload performance in any substantial way?
- Cost considerations: Higher replication comes at a higher cost. You need to balance your need for redundancy with your budget.
In conclusion, designing and configuring storage-level replication for SAP workloads is an important aspect of Azure administration. By considering the needs of your application and business, and understanding the different options available to you in Azure, you can make an informed decision regarding which storage replication option will best serve your requirements. This is also one of the important topics in the AZ-120 planning and administering Microsoft Azure for SAP workloads exam. By mastering this, it will help you not only to pass your exam but also configure Azure for SAP workloads effectively and efficiently.
Practice Test
True or False: Azure Site Recovery does not support the replication of SAP HANA databases.
- True
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: Azure Site Recovery supports the replication of SAP HANA databases in Azure.
Single Select: What is required when you replicate SAP HANA databases using Azure Site Recovery?
- a) Azure Backup
- b) Azure NetApp Files
- c) ExpressRoute
- d) Azure Storage Account
Answer: d) Azure Storage Account
Explanation: You need an Azure Storage account when you replicate SAP HANA databases using Azure Site Recovery to store replicated data.
Single select: Which Azure storage service is recommended for hosting SAP HANA databases?
- a) Azure Blob Storage
- b) Azure Disk Storage
- c) Azure File Storage
- d) Azure Queue Storage
Answer: b) Azure Disk Storage
Explanation: Azure Disk Storage supports the IOPS and throughput required by SAP HANA databases.
True or False: Azure NetApp Files is a shared storage solution for SAP HANA.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: Azure NetApp Files offers multiple performance tiers and it’s a shared storage solution for SAP HANA scale-out deployments.
Multiple select: Which of the following does Azure offer for SAP HANA system replication?
- a) Backup and recovery
- b) High availability
- c) Disaster recovery
- d) Vertical Scaling
Answer: a) Backup and recovery, b) High availability, c) Disaster recovery
Explanation: Azure offers backup and recovery, high availability, and disaster recovery as part of its SAP HANA replication solution.
Single select: What high availability solution does Azure offer for SAP HANA?
- a) SAP HANA System Replication
- b) Automated Storage Replication
- c) Load Balancing
- d) Virtual Machine Scale Sets
Answer: a) SAP HANA System Replication
Explanation: Azure offers the SAP HANA System Replication as a high availability solution for SAP HANA databases.
True or False: SAP HANA system replication supports multi-target replication in Azure.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: SAP HANA system replication does support multi-target replication in Azure to provide redundancy.
Multiple select: What are the two replication modes supported by Azure for SAP HANA?
- a) Synchronous
- b) Asynchronous
- c) Semi-synchronous
- d) Fully synchronous
Answer: a) Synchronous, b) Asynchronous
Explanation: Azure supports synchronous and asynchronous replication modes for SAP HANA.
Single select: What is the main purpose of implementing storage-level replication for SAP workloads on Azure?
- a) Increase storage capacity
- b) Save costs on additional storage
- c) Ensure data persistence and availability
- d) Accelerate data processing
Answer: c) Ensure data persistence and availability
Explanation: The main purpose of implementing storage-level replication for SAP workloads on Azure is to ensure data persistence and availability.
True or False: Replication of storage is done at the file system level in Azure.
- True
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: In Azure, replication is typically handled at the data (block) level, not at the file system level.
Interview Questions
What is the replication type commonly used in managing SAP workloads on Azure?
Azure Geo-redundant storage (GRS) is commonly used in managing SAP workloads on Azure because it provides automatic replication of data to a secondary region.
What is the purpose of SAP HANA System Replication (HSR)?
SAP HANA System Replication (HSR) is a high availability and disaster recovery solution provided by SAP. It enables the primary SAP HANA system to replicate data onto a secondary system in real-time, ensuring high availability and prevent data loss.
Can Premium Storage support SAP HANA databases in Azure?
Yes, Premium Storage supports Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) and can be used to deploy SAP HANA databases in Azure.
If your primary replication strategy is SAP HANA System Replication, does Azure Site Recovery provide an additional layer of protection for VMs?
Yes, While SAP HANA System Replication is a primary strategy for high availability and for disaster recovery scenarios, Azure Site Recovery can serve as a secondary disaster recovery strategy for the replications of virtual machines (VMs) at an OS level.
What is the use of Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) in managing SAP workloads?
With RA-GRS, Azure provides read-only access to the data in the secondary location, in addition to replicating the data across regions. This can be very useful in the event of a regional outage or for applications that need to load-balance read access.
How many copies of Azure Storage data does Azure make?
Azure Storage makes multiple (at least three) copies of your data. This ensures durability and high availability of data.
What kind of storage is recommended for SAP HANA data and log volumes?
Premium SSDs or Azure Ultra Disk Storage is recommended for SAP HANA data and log volumes because of their high throughput, low latency and superior performance.
What are Azure managed disks?
Azure managed disks are block-level storage volumes that are managed by Azure and used with Azure Virtual Machines. Managed disks allow you to create high-availability solutions with great ease.
What replication option is recommended for disaster recovery of SAP HANA Large Instance?
SAP HANA System Replication is the recommended replication option provided natively for disaster recovery of SAP HANA Large Instance.
What kinds of storage replication does Azure offer?
Azure offers several types of storage replication, which includes: Locally redundant storage (LRS), Zone-redundant storage (ZRS), Geo-redundant storage (GRS), and Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS). Each offers different levels of data resiliency.
What is the optimal use case of Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)?
ZRS is ideal for applications that need high availability and durability without the additional latency associated with geo-replication. It replicates data across availability zones which are unique physical locations within an Azure region.
How does Azure Site Recovery help in disaster recovery?
Azure Site Recovery helps in disaster recovery by orchestrating replication, failover and recovery of workloads and applications so that they are available from a secondary location if the primary location fails.
What is Azure Backup and how can it aid in managing SAP workloads?
Azure Backup is a service in Azure that allows you to back up and restore your data in Microsoft Azure. It can be used to back up SAP HANA databases running on Azure VMs.
Is Azure File Share suitable to be used for SAP HANA shared files?
Yes, Azure File Share backed by Premium SSDs is a viable option for SAP HANA shared files.
Can Azure NetApp Files be used for SAP HANA data and log volumes?
Yes, Azure NetApp Files is validated and certified by SAP for HANA production use-cases, and can be used for SAP HANA data and log volumes.
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